Blu-ray Playback and SATA, USB Performance
H.264 HD Video Decode AccelerationPlaying back video of ANY kind on a low-cost PC can be a risking venture – users of current generation products have likely seen slow down and choppiness from “HD” content on YouTube or Viddler or other streaming video sites. While the GeForce 9400M chipset won’t address those specific issues directly the integrated graphics core in the ION platform will allow the playback of true HD video up to resolutions of 1080p. Obviously most netbooks and small form-factor PCs won’t have a Blu-ray drive but that doesn’t mean that HD video content isn’t an issue. I was recently on a trip with a friend of mine that was trying to watch rented HD movies from the iTunes store but his older iBook laptop just couldn’t handle the decoding fast enough.
As we have seen with NVIDIA’s chipsets and GPUs for years now, the H.264 decode process can no essentially be completely offloaded from the CPU to the GPU allowing for a more efficient, and vastly superior, viewing environment. To test this theory I simply played back the Dark Knight trailer in both iTunes (using the CPU) and CyberLink PowerDVD 8 (using the GPU):
While playing under iTunes you can see the HyperThreaded CPU is clearly pegged at 100% CPU utilization and the video was dropping frames during playback. This was far from a passable user experience.
Using the PowerDVD software that is GPU-accelerated the playback was not only smooth, but the CPU was only being utilized to about 20% of its capacity; the rest of the workload was going to the GF9400M GPU that was more than capable of handling the 20 Mb/s playback rates of this trailer.
For my testing with the new Zotac ION motherboard and the AMD 780G-platform, I did in fact use a Blu-ray drive and a copy of Transformers on Blu-ray that is encoded in high bit-rate H.264 – usually 25-30 Mbps. In this case, both the ION platform and the AMD 780G motherboard offer H.264 decode acceleration.
CPU utilization for both platforms while watching the high bit-rate H.264 encoding Blu-ray movie is pretty low – about 25%. Playback was smooth and flawless on both the ION platform and the AMD platform though I would say with the lower “raw” CPU power on the ION system I am probably more impressed with what NVIDIA’s GPU is doing in this case. Regardless, a user of either configuration gets a great performing Blu-ray box.
HDTach 3.0.4.0
HDTach allows us to evaluate the performance of any storage subsystem including SATA, eSATA, USB and Firewire where available.
Our SATA results (above) show both motherboard to be on equal footing when it comes to the average transfer rate.
